Weiyi cao (p), Eveline van Leeuwen, Nico Heerink

Dimitris Ballas

Capabilities, pioneered by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, are individuals’ real opportunities, “such as their genuine opportunities to be educated, their ability to move around or to enjoy supportive social relationships” (Robeyns & Byskov, Winter 2020 Edition, para.10). This paper studies migrants’ housing in the Netherlands and asks: do migrants have equal capabilities and functionings in obtaining housing compared to the native population in the Netherlands? The paper makes a contribution to the capability approach by operationalizing it in the studies of housing deprivation of migrants and by revealing how personal, social, and environmental factors shape these restricted capabilities in housing.
By analyzing the WoON (Housing Research) 2018 dataset, the study examines whether people with a migration background in the Netherlands pay comparatively higher rents or purchase prices in obtaining similar quality of housing than people without a migration background. The difference in housing-related capabilities and functionings between the migrant and native population could be a result of migrants’ different housing needs as well as limitations in social conditions such as housing discrimination and segregation. When thinking about how to effectively improve migrants’ integration through housing, we urge scholars and policymakers to apply the capability approach in order to better understand how opportunities are restricted and how interventions in making up for these lost opportunities can be applied.

Carlo Caporali (p), Federico Maggio

Weiyi cao and Eveline van Leeuwen

During the 2010s, Venezuela underwent the worst and deepest crisis of any non- war-ridden country in modern history. The failure of the socialist utopia, the economic crisis, the increasing lack of primary resources, and the dictatorial turn have caused the third, most dramatic, and complex Venezuelan out-migration wave in the past decade. Drawing on exclusive and georeferenced survey data collected in Venezuela and providing information on 21,382 individuals, this paper investigates the role of the police force militarization in the Venezuelan migration crisis of 2018. We find that the higher is the level of authoritative violence - proxied by the share of homicides committed by the security forces - the higher is the likelihood for an individual to migrate. The effect is significant only among males with a lower level of education. Estimates which rely on the travel time from the capital to each state’s most populated city as an instrumental variable, are robust to the inclusion of several households, environmental and socio- demographic characteristics, including the overall level of violence represented by the number of violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

Dimitris Ballas (p)

Carlo Caporali

This paper focuses on the impacts of forced migration and in particular the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe and beyond. In particular, the paper considers forced migration from the perspective of the destination region, with a particular focus on European regions and in particular on the social attitudes of the local population towards migrants, making use of suitable secondary data. The paper considers and discusses key individual socio-economic as well as spatial contextual factors that affect the responses or what may be likely responses of populations at regional level to the refugee crisis (including considerations of the impacts of the forced migration flows over the past 10 years but also the more recent developments and refugee crisis resulting from the Russian invasion of and attack on Ukraine) and their ability to welcome and integrate refugees in the short and long run, including social and demographic characteristics, local governance structure, social capital, local labour market conditions, local, national and international media discourses, social attitudes, social norms and values, historical background and collective memories. The paper presents statistical analysis of suitable social attitude survey microdata available for European countries and regions (such as the European Social Survey and the European Values Survey) in Europe, taking into account possible contextual impacts and interactions between variables at individual, regional and national level.